what are barack obama's flaws?

The Drone PPG is from 2013, after the escalation. Or are you talking about something else?

I already stated that he changed the rules of engagement that rendered the killing of civilians quite a trivial matter under his watch, thus me saying his laissez faire drone strikes are a major part of his legacy. You're all fucking crazy tbh!

But that's not true?

I'm not trying to be an apologist, I'm not trying to apologize for his actions. What you're saying isn't really his actions, though?

He personally changed the rules of engagement, which led to escalating civilian deaths during his presidency, there is no Bama-splaining or bullshit sophistry that gets him a free pass from that.

― calzino, Thursday, December 28, 2017 9:33 PM (thirty-four minutes ago)

this is fucking moronic. obama's predecessor launched a needless war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. he also started the drone war. you have to be a shameless republican apologist to argue that obama "escalated civilian deaths."

incidentally, the guy in office now killed more civilians in his first seven months than obama did in eight years:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-has-already-killed-more-civilians-obama-us-fight-against-isis-653564

The drone war escalated under Obama, though, exactly because he de-escalated conventional warfare. I think civilian deaths escalated as well in 2009-2013, but I just can't find that personal change in rules of engagement that calzino is talking about.

Can we just get to the heart of the matter and admit that Obama’s greatest flaw is being buddies with Prince Harry and that’s why calzino is actually here tonight

^^^

the obama line that haunts me is from his 2013 speech about drones, a characteristically thoughtful and adult turning-over of a problem, a speech that respects you the citizen-listener as someone capable of coming to nuanced conclusions about complex situations, opener than probably any postwar president (save maybe eisenhower on his way out the door-- actually having similarly helped to construct a horrifying new system as an alternative to conventional warfare) about the potential corrosive effect of pentagon/cia infrastructure on american democracy, a good lecture by a conservative but smart and honest professor. and then this announcement buried in the middle of it as the single relevant piece of oh-right-i-am-also-the-emperor policy:

And that’s why, over the last four years, my administration has worked vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists –- insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.

such a relief that Policy Guidance was codified for our current President. so glad we decided to stick with the "but what if the imperial executive with apparent legal authority to dispatch death robots anywhere in the world were always really thoughtful" plan. assume this program now just runs itself, when jared's not using it to call in strikes on cod griefers.

there really aren't a lot of more likable presidents, or even "better" ones if yr criteria is "sociopathy". there are a lot of more successful ones unfortunately (and occasionally fortunately). i guess the shit i'd talk about him is that he wasn't up to his moment after all. in retrospect, who was?

(and I wouldn’t really argue with that reasoning tbf)

http://i.imgur.com/MvIplcX.jpg

Obama’s “moment” was about him as an avatar. He hardly had a chance to live up to that.

How many has been more succesful than him, though? In all honesty it's not more than ten, is it?

Also, I fliipped through that book of Drone Memos, and that rules of engagement change really isn't there.

it was also about becoming president at a moment that only seems more of a hinge with time. he really could have put different people in charge of the recovery, for instance. xp

He's more than an avatar for black voters.

Presidential rankings are fucked because Getting Things Done regardless of the damage these things do to the country is the lode star.

...but by those standards in the last, oh, sixty years Barack Hussein Obama ranks with LBJ and Reagan.

a legacy complicated by only having a few months of an ideologically congenial Congress whereas LBJ and Reagan had years.

How many has been more succesful than him, though? In all honesty it's not more than ten, is it?

feel like the number is v different in different scenarios for the next decade.

Those three are the best in sixty years, and LBJ couldn't run for reelection in 68. The floor is really low :)

yeah 10 is a lot tbh! he is clearly a major president.

reagan looking like one of the best is one of the reasons this is such a depressing exercise

also W is prob as effective as those three, in the sense of having had an effect, lol, tho clearly not "successful" even in the respect-your-nemeses reagan sense

He's more than an avatar for black voters.

Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge and Reagan the only presidents in 20th century who got a followed by someone from their own party without having to die or resign for it. And with both Roosevelt and Coolidge that followup presidency kinda ended in disaster.

I think Obama's biggest flaw is that he never really loved the parts of the job that required a lot of politicking. I don't think his personality was well suited for that.

The other phenomenon with these presidents is that their considerable flaws (I mean, LBJ and Reagan's mortal sins are easy to list) matter less than how they shifted the political culture.

dlh is such an excellent poster, just saying like!

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/obama-biggest-achievements-213487

Domestically, Obama accomplished a ton. He was the perfecr centrist Democratic president. Whatever limitations he had were the limitations of that particular form of politics. For instance, he was never going to nationalize the banks or propose free college or whatever — that would uave taken a different kind of president.

I’ll never understand the drone war. I guess it was a really awful way of “managing” these terrorist organizations without devoting the resources to summarily defeat them (which in any case would be impossible, as the Bush wars proved)? It seemed like he was just resigned to an idea of perpetual war in the Middle East and North Africa...

btw did anyone read david garrow's huge obama bio from earlier this year? haven't picked it up yet but i gathered from the reviews that garrow's stance was that obama was basically a failed president, which seemed to account for a lot of the negative reaction to it.

The instruments necessary to end the seemingly perpetual war(s) in MENA are too enormous for even the largest POTUS to wield, clumsily or otherwise.

I think he was a pretty great foreign policy president all considered but we’re basically ceding all those gains now (Cuba, China, two state solution, etc) and then some

By the feeble yardstick I mentioned these are the presidents in chronological order about whom I can say they changed political culture and got shit, good and terrible, done.

Washington
Jefferson
Jackson
Polk
Lincoln
Wilson
FDR
Ike
LBJ
Reagan
Obama

The military stuff provokes a lot of dissonance for me because it’s impossible for me to not love what Obama stood for, as a black president who won by convincing voters that America was better than it was. He wanted to transcend the ugliness of factional politics and all the bigotries and resentments that underwrite it. And this was impossible and I guess led to a return of the repressed in the form of Trump, and the tea party before that. But still — he did a good job selling the idea of America’s legitimacy to this cynical millennial who was a teenager during the Bush years.

return of the repressed in the form of Trump

return of the what now? when did we start repressing white people again?

That’s a Freudian term. I meant liberals were able to repress their knowledge of the intractability of racism because we elected a black president. Obama quite purposefully spoke in universal terms whenever possible, emphasizing commonalities over differences, and it was all for nought because his very existence still provoked insane, delirious backlash on the right, his modest reformism caricatured in the most extreme terms

alfred's prez-significance list seems solid to me (tho i'd replace ike with truman, i think).

i couldn't imagine rating obama above washington, lincoln, or FDR, but his worst policies (drone program, dragging out endgame in iraq and afghanistan, you could argue he could've gotten more done in the first two years and i wouldn't disagree) don't seem in the same class as those of LBJ (vietnam), wilson (racist, worst civil liberties record of any prez), or jackson (you know).

That’s a Freudian term. I meant liberals were able to repress their knowledge of the intractability of racism

And I know this was a privileged perspective etc but I think a lot of people from all kinds of backgrounds felt moved by his election and what it might portend for the future of this country. “Hope” was his brand and, to me, the whole Trump thing felt first and foremost like a cruel repudiation of this hope, which was painful, I think, even for people who maybe came to see what Obama stood for as naive.

I thought about Truman, dealt a bad hand after FDR's death (failing to give a shit about a vice president when he, the president, was dying and so much shit was left to strikes me as FDR's most grievous sin after the interment camps), and inheriting a post-New Deal landscape. Ike stands out for (a) empowering the hidden government, CIA, to wage the covert war we couldn't admit to fighting (b) being a Republican who dealt with reality, i.e. the New Deal ain't going anywhere. It took Reagan to begin the dismantling.

I'd say Grant deserves a serious reevaluation (and has gotten one!) for being the only president -- GOP or Democrat -- to genuinely care about keeping the federal government's promises to the freedmen, and Teddy R. for understanding PR.

yeah i think "grant was hopelessly corrupt and bad, also a degenerate" was/is a disguised component of the lost-cause idea cluster

Yep. It also flummoxed historians as intelligent as Eric Josephson that corrupt-to-their-toenails pols like Roscoe Conkling genuinely supported black voting rights and social liberty for them.

Harding is another president dying to be wrest from several decades of obloquy. Certainly between TR and FDR he was more generous toward enemies and had a solid Cabinet. No great or even good president but not awful like celebrated ones like Jackson and Wilson.

er, Matthew Josephson

I'd put Teddy Roosevelt on that list and remove Wilson + LBJ for having their late presidencies basically destroyed by failed foreign policy. Didn't Harding have an amazingly corrupt cabinet?

Warren Harding earned his obloquy so masterfully that he deserves his own thread of flaws.

Teddy didn't do much except masterfully promote himself as trustbuster and as Great Father.

incidentally, the guy in office now killed more civilians in his first seven months than obama did in eight years:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-has-already-killed-more-civilians-obama-us-fight-against-isis-653564

Never heard of the UK-based group cited in that article, but they seem to think there were only about 3000 civilian deaths under Obama, which if you read the NYTMag story on Iraqi deaths last month seems totally fucking ludicrous.

He's more than an avatar for black voters.

ICYMI

"(This) paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis, the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and so homeowners were left to drown.

"As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013."

http://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/12/07/destruction-of-black-wealth-during-the-obama-presidency/

The Trump vs Obama data wrt drones only covers anti-ISIS action in Iraq and Syria - not any of the other people being bombed fwiw.

isn't the gist of that Presidential Policy Guidance May 22 2013 document, that he alone was effectively judge/jury/executioner + would sign off on death from the skies, without any further scrutiny of data on targets? Well anyways, at least they got the Nobel Peace prize in early doors.

Obama quite purposefully spoke in universal terms whenever possible, emphasizing commonalities over differences, and it was all for nought because his very existence still provoked insane, delirious backlash on the right, his modest reformism caricatured in the most extreme terms

And it didn't (and probably nothing ever could) stop the eventual rightwing line on him being that he played the race card and sowed racial division every time he opened his mouth.